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March 6, 2022 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:23
Episode 1674 Scott Adams: Apologists, Propaganda and Putin. Your Best Bet Is To Hate Everyone

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Reframing the Ukraine War VISA and Mastercard sanction Russia The Democrats midterm and 2024 strategy Apologist strategy Pence's talent for skillfully saying nothing ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best place in the solar system, possibly beyond.
No, I take that back, probably beyond as well.
And despite the fact that the news is largely a big black box that we can't see into, We're going to talk about it just like it was real news.
We're going to pretend that our subjective impressions of reality are something like reality itself.
Then we're going to talk about it.
But first, we're going to drink a liquid before that.
Yeah. If you could describe a really good time, what would it sound like?
It would sound like this.
I think I'll drink a liquid...
And then I'll talk about things that probably aren't real at all.
But I'll pretend they are.
And then we'll argue about it with our lack of understanding.
But before that, let's do the simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice, a stein, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it goes like this.
Were you ready? Did I catch you off guard?
I hope you were ready.
I mean, goodness. If there's anything at all that you should have been ready for, it's that.
Well, for those people who are subscribers to the locals, my locals community only, there's a new micro lesson I put up there, a little three-minute lesson debunking the five languages of love.
Have you ever heard of the concept of the five languages of love?
The Gary Chapman book?
Let's just say there's never been a better scam.
And I'm not talking about Gary Chapman.
I'm talking about people who use the five languages of love.
So anyway, that's only for the subscribers of Locals.
I have a question for you based on something I saw on Twitter just before I got on here.
I saw somebody on Twitter.
Really? Really? Did I suddenly get a problem with my audio?
No audio on locals.
Let me debunk this for a moment.
That can only be because this bumped into this, which bumped into that, which then bumped into something else.
Totally fixed.
All right. All good.
So I saw on Twitter somebody asked...
Well, somebody was pointing out that they were talking to a high-level executive at some big company that was unnamed.
And the executive of the big company that was unnamed...
I was unaware of almost any of the stories that we talk about.
You know, I mean, obviously everybody knows there's a Ukraine-Russia thing.
But beyond that, most of the things that we talk about, never heard of them.
And I'm not talking about didn't have an informed opinion.
I'm talking about didn't even know it was a thing.
Never heard of him at all.
Now, so there's no sound on the locals' platform.
Why would that be?
Oh. Let's try this.
I'm going to try to restart it.
And please bear with me.
Technical difficulties.
So, have you ever noticed that if you don't get enough sleep, your technology doesn't work as well?
Have you ever noticed that?
YouTube is frozen too?
Really? That's weird.
Is there anything happening over here?
YouTube is good? Let me just fire this back up.
Good morning.
Oh, goddammit.
How is everybody? Okay, I love these dog pictures, as usual.
Keep them coming. So...
So local...
How the United States created...
Oh, just stop it, stop it.
All right, sorry about this.
But we will be back in a moment.
Or not, I guess.
Maybe not. I just love debunking things in real time.
Debunking and debugging.
This isn't going to work at all, is it?
All right, I've got a feeling that this is going to be one of those days.
So let's take it from here.
I think everything's up at this point.
So, here's a question.
How many of you have friends who don't know what any of the news is, except for the biggest part of the news?
How many of you have actually known Like, you talk to your friends and you want to talk about the things you were talking about on Twitter, and they don't know any of the topics.
That's been my experience.
My experience is that as soon as I'm not talking to a digital medium, I don't know anybody who knows about any of the topics I talk about.
I can't even think of anybody off the top of my head.
Well, actually, I guess anybody I know who's watching my livestream would know about these topics.
But for the most part, people don't really have any idea what's going on in the news.
So here's a question for you, especially if you're not following the news.
Is the war that's happening now with Russia and Ukraine, what is the best way to frame it, if you're going to describe it to somebody?
And one way to look at it is it's turned into a supply line war, wouldn't you say?
It turned into a pure logistics war.
Because right now it looks like the Ukrainians are trying to starve the Russians and deprive them of food and gas, which is pretty good.
But they're laying siege to the siegers.
Has that ever happened before?
Can you think of a time in which the entity, the army that was laying siege to a city, somebody says yes many times?
I mean, that would be the most obvious strategy.
But generally, if somebody is surrounded, wouldn't they need help from some other...
The Siege of Syracuse.
There's always somebody on these live streams who knows anything.
The Siege of Syracuse and the Peloponnesian War.
And I'm thinking, somebody actually knew that.
Stalingrad. Oh, Stalingrad.
Is that a good example?
The last 20 years in the Middle East.
Well, like I was saying, it's definitely the most common strategy in the world.
But if you had to bet on it just on that, let's say I said to you that the entire war would be decided by who does the better job of cutting off the supplies from the other.
Who wins? What would you say?
Now, that's not the only variable by far, but suppose it was.
If the only thing you were looking at is who could cut off the supplies better from the other side, who would win?
I'm saying your answers are Russia, Russia.
So you think Russia would win because they would be able to resupply better?
I don't know. I'm not so sure.
I guess if Russia does get control of the sky, then it's over, isn't it?
But I think so far the Ukrainians have been pretty successful at cutting down the supply lines, or so it sounds.
Actually, let me correct that.
Can we agree...
That 100% of the stuff that comes out of that war area that's pro-Ukraine and how plucky and accomplished they are, you can't trust any of it, right?
You all know that, right?
So even when I find myself repeating something like it's common knowledge, because it feels like common knowledge that the column of trucks is bogged down for some reason.
But is it? I don't know.
Maybe it's not bogged down at all.
Maybe it's just right where it wants to be, exactly on plan for whatever it was going to do.
Who knows? So just assume you don't know anything about what's going on there.
But the other ways to look at this is a puppet war.
So Putin wants to put in a Putin puppet, and the U.S. wants a West-oriented puppet.
Puppet? A NATO puppet?
So this is really like a puppet fight, isn't it?
And it's a puppet fight, which is ridiculous.
It's a puppet fight where zillions of non-puppets get killed.
What do you guess is going to be the ultimate death toll out of this thing?
Do you think a million people are going to die when this is done?
I'm going to put a death toll estimate on this.
So this would be...
I'm going to say all deaths, civilian and military on both sides.
Yeah, I don't think it'll be a million.
It'll be difficult to count.
So here's the...
The wild card is the starvation, isn't it?
And the medical deaths that would have been preventable, that sort of thing.
The freezing, if anybody freezes.
I'm going to say...
I'm looking at your numbers to bias me.
Yeah, the people saying 50,000 to 100,000.
That feels about right.
Right as in wrong, but, you know, close to the number.
Now, I've told you before that if you work in a numbers kind of job, you end up having this weird ability to estimate things that you shouldn't have any ability to estimate, because you don't even have any Assumptions or raw data to base your estimates on.
And somehow, if you work around numbers long enough, you just get sort of a sense for how things are going to work out.
It's sort of a weird thing.
It's not some magic power I have.
I think it would be true of just people who do predicting and estimating and numbers for a living.
And I'm going to say that the people saying 50 to 100...
I think that's going to be the right range, which is pretty awful.
Now, you know, compare that to other tragedies.
And, I mean, it's a big one.
And the bigger tragedy, of course, will be that the lives of all those people who are displaced are ruined.
The economic damage, the, you know, second and third order damage from the The sanctions on Russia, whatever the hell Russia does about that.
So that's all looking pretty bad.
One way to look at this is that the whole problem here is NATO provocation.
So that's one way you could frame it.
NATO was being too aggressive about what countries it associated with close to Russia, and that looked like anybody could have known that that was going to cause a problem.
So that's one way to look at it.
Another way is that, and we see smart people saying this, that basically Putin's just a conquest puppy, and he's just got to conquer stuff.
And he might be looking at Germany, as in actually literally thinking about how he could take over Germany.
Now, I don't believe that, so this would not be my interpretation.
But look at the difference about You know, how people are looking at the cause of it and what the hell is going on.
It's a puppet war, it's NATO provocation, it's Putin provocation.
Can it just be all of those things?
It's all of those things, right?
So anyway, Visa and MasterCard and somebody else has suspended operations in Russia.
And so you might ask yourself, how can the Russian economy survive?
Well, apparently people are rapidly signing up for a Chinese version of Visa and MasterCard.
And what would happen to Russia in terms of their national security if all of their credit card purchases ran through China?
Could China gather all of the personal spending habits of all the Russians and Because they would have all the Russian financial data coming through all the transactions.
Could they use that data and feed it into their AI to have a crushing advantage over Russia that there's nothing they can do about it?
Because the information will just be China's.
It'll run through Chinese servers.
So if you think to yourself, man, Putin sure is clever.
He found a way to get out of these sanctions...
Look what he found. Look at what his only option is.
His only option is to get in bed with China.
Now, if you were going to predict this forward, which is really the best way to predict, because the people who predict the past, far less challenging.
So let's predict the future this time, to really raise the bar on the difficulty level.
I would say the most likely outcome is that Putin does horrible damage to Ukraine, but essentially controls it.
There's a long, long resistance that bleeds him, but he stays in power because he can.
And that eventually, 10 to 20 years, maybe sooner, I'll say average 10 years maybe, Putin will think, man, was that a mistake?
To give so much power to China.
Because China will use its power, won't it?
There's nothing that will stop China from taking advantage of any advantage they get over Russia or anybody else, as far as I know.
So I'll bet there will be a pendulum swing where Putin, if he's still there in 10 years, he's going to be looking at, how the heck can I get away from China's grasp and be more friends with Putin?
With the West. That's my prediction, if he laughs.
The other possibility is somebody takes Putin out.
But I always think that's a...
That just feels like wishing, doesn't it?
Doesn't that just feel like, you know, just wishing?
I don't think Putin's going to be taken out.
Do you? I don't think so.
I mean, that seems like the least likely possibility.
But it also looks like what the U.S. is playing to.
It looks like the United States is playing a decapitation game with almost no chance of succeeding.
It's like our strategy is designed to force the Russian public to change their own government.
I don't think there's much chance of that happening, is there?
You know, are we not pursuing a strategy that has almost, I don't know, 5% chance of working, something like that, at best?
Now, maybe our government, I'd like to think it's true, knows more than we do about what they can and cannot do.
But from my vantage point, it doesn't look like we have a strategy that has any rational narrative to it.
Am I right? Could anybody describe a connection between what we're doing, you know, we in the West and NATO and the United States, can anybody describe how what we're doing leads to a better outcome?
Like, just tell the story of, okay, well, we're doing this, and then because we're doing this, this will happen.
Can anybody even tell that story?
I couldn't.
So here's a big question.
Why are we not talking more about the potential grain shortage?
Isn't Ukraine the breadbasket?
And is it an inconvenience?
Or is it mass starvation if the war causes people not to have access to the Ukrainian grain?
And here's the other thing I ask.
Could one of the unintended consequences of the war be a mass shortage of bread, the type that makes Americans fat, and cause actually a reduction in obesity?
Work with me here. A reduction in obesity such that we save more lives from natural heart attacks and shit than die in the war.
I know. I know.
It's a rage. It's a rage.
But what would happen if Americans just stopped eating bread for a year because it was hard to get?
We wouldn't starve, right?
In America, we wouldn't starve.
We would just not have sandwiches.
We'd just eat other things.
You know, bread wouldn't be that big a deal.
If you go to a restaurant, you know, a lot of people don't eat the bread anyway.
So, I don't know.
We could probably cut our bread supply in half and just get healthier.
I don't think we would get hungrier.
I think we'd get healthier. In fact...
Bread makes you hungry, so that's my theory.
Bread makes you hungry. Well, Trump was...
Trump...
Oh, wait.
Before that, one more point.
Here are some other unintended consequences that's going to come out of all this Ukraine stuff.
I think the U.S., Is eventually going to be energy independent.
It might require the next president to do that.
But I think we will be forever energy independent in a few years, getting back to where we were.
So I think this probably causes a permanent rethink in our whole energy situation, which would be good for us.
The other thing is that, you know, issues with the pandemic and China and such, I feel like the future of manufacturing looks like this.
That somebody like me, or just a person, could create a manufacturing site in their garage And all they would need would be 3D printers for various materials.
And that if somebody wanted to buy a certain item, let's say furniture.
Let's say furniture.
They would, instead of shipping it, you'd have it built within a few blocks of the customer.
Somebody would actually just build the chair in their own garage.
And all they would do is they would bid...
They would bid on the order.
If they get the low bid, the CAD CAM plans are downloaded into their printers.
It doesn't have to be printers.
They could have wood, and they just put it into a cutting machine, and the cutting could be also designated by the CAD. So there could be some human intervention, but basically just to move materials onto cutting surfaces.
So you can get a point where You could order a couch and the guy three doors down actually makes it.
Just because he was the low bidder who was also in your zip code.
Now, such a dreamer.
Well, more generally, let me say this.
I'm trying to paint a picture of how different it could be.
Not specifically that different.
But here's the picture.
When we bring manufacturing back from China, we should be looking to leapfrog The old way of doing things.
The old way of doing things being more manual.
So we should be able to bring manufacturing back at the same time our technology allows us to do it completely differently.
So you'd want to solve your shipping costs by finding ways to distribute the orders electronically and use local materials to build it so all the shipping costs go away.
You want to be able to You want to be able to use robots and you want to be able to use 3D printing and all that stuff.
And, you know, automatic cutting of all materials, those sort of things.
So I think that's where it's going to go.
And the interesting thing is that you always give the advantage to the person who is leapfrogging the last technology.
And the last technology was still sort of robots slash people working one place and shipping it to a foreign country.
We've got to be able to do better than that.
All right, well, Trump is making news, of course.
He was talking to donors and reportedly said, and I say reportedly because, who knows, maybe he didn't say this, but reportedly he said, He mused, they say, that we should take our F-22 planes, quote, put the Chinese flag on them and bomb the shit out of Russia, quote, and then we say China did it, and we didn't do it, and China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.
Of course, social media and the news treated that like it was a serious comment.
Now, I hate to be the Trump-splainer all the time.
You know, it's like it's an exhausting job.
But let me tell you how to interpret this in Trump talk.
We should be more clever.
That's it. That's it.
We should be more clever, which I totally agree with.
Now, his example is just, you know, funny hyperbole, and nobody should take that as serious.
But you get the idea that we should be more clever.
Now, I think that's all he's saying, but he's saying it in a funny way.
All right, so then that becomes big news.
But, of course, it looks like the Democrats' strategy...
If you look across the various Democrat-heavy media, doesn't it look like the strategy is going to be to take the heat off of Biden and demonize Republicans by making everything about Trump and making him the apologist?
So it looks like the play is to take out Tucker Carlson and Trump at the same time with the same topic.
Tell me I'm wrong. I'm not.
It's very clear that the Democrat play via the media is to paint Trump as an apologist and Tucker as an apologist because Tucker is the strongest voice that people trust on the right at the point.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't.
I'm just saying it's true. And Trump, of course, whether he runs or he doesn't, He can be used to demonize the entire Republican Party.
So since Russia is always automatically connected to Trump every time it comes up, this is sort of a perfect play.
And you can see Margaret Sullivan writing for the Washington Post.
The title of her thing is that how Putin's full-scale information war got a key assist from Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and others in right-wing media.
So here's a very direct statement of what is probably...
Going to be the Democrat strategy.
And she ends her piece by saying...
calling, I think, Trump an apologist.
Now, apologist is your key word for propaganda.
I've taught you that, right?
As soon as you see apologist, you're like, oh, no.
Anybody who disagrees with you, you can paint them as an apologist.
You can just take any topic in the news...
What's your opinion?
And then figure out what's the opinion of the people who disagree with you.
And then figure out who they're talking about, because there's usually a person involved.
And then you call them an apologist.
Or an apologist for, you know, genocide.
Or an apologist for something bad happening.
So as soon as you see apologist, that is not factual reporting.
That is propaganda reporting.
So, and then apparently Pence used the word apologist, and this could be, I don't know if it's coincidence or who started saying it first, but you're going to see this apologist thing everywhere.
And because Pence said it as well, that really makes the message stick.
So he thought, no, he wasn't calling, he didn't directly say that Trump or anybody was an apologist, but he said, there's no room in this party, talk about Republicans, there's no room in this party for apologists for Putin.
There is only room for champions of freedom, which is, of course, a big old nothing statement.
Pence could say nothing better than anybody.
I was always impressed at how well he could say nothing, because he doesn't leave you anything to really grab onto.
He's pretty slippery.
In a skillful way, he is.
So... That's going on.
So, what do you think is going to happen with the war?
How many would take my prediction at this point?
So, just going to be your yeses and nos.
The question is, will Russia get control of essentially all of Ukraine?
Yes or no? Will Russia get Ukraine in the end here?
Seeing almost all yeses, but a few nos.
Now, I don't know what a no really means.
In this case, it might mean if the resistance stays active and ten years later there's another puppet government that's pro-West.
I don't know. Does that mean that Putin never got control?
So there might be some gray area here.
So I can see why you'd say no even if it looks like a yes.
All right, so if you think that'll happen, number two, will the economy of Russia be degraded in a way that makes a war like this forever impractical?
So here's the question.
I see lots of no's, but also some yes's.
So what do you think, YouTube?
Do you think...
We're very mixed on this.
So the hardest thing to predict is how Putin will do with the sanctions.
Or really how long they'll last and how deep they'll go.
And if you think that China is going to be the savior, you know, there's still another plague here, which is that companies in China that help Russia...
Could be also subject to sanctions, so not China itself, but correct me if I'm wrong, couldn't we easily apply the sanctions to a Chinese bank that helps, or the Chinese credit card, and then wouldn't it take that out of international use?
Couldn't we, for example, take the Chinese credit card company that's going to save Russia and take that out of the international network?
So it couldn't use regular banks.
And then the next part is, are we giving Russia and China everything they want?
Which is, they'll band together, they'll make some kind of a currency that competes with the dollar, and then we're really screwed.
Because our only real power is the dollar.
Yeah, that's pretty risky, isn't it?
But I always wonder if the country with the biggest military...
Can ever have a weak dollar or a weak currency.
And then you throw in crypto in there, and that's a lot of uncertainty.
All right. I'm going to make my prediction.
My prediction is that Russia will suffer financially to such a degree...
That it will really be a deterrent to anybody thinking they want to do something like this again.
Even though there's nothing like this.
Now, what I mean like this, I mean two modern countries fighting with modern equipment in a border skirmish.
So I don't know how many things will be like that.
But I think that the damage to Russia, because I think Putin will hold on, which means that the sanctions will continue.
And I think that in...
But I'm going to give you a twist on this.
I think over, let's say, I think over the next 10 years, it's going to look like a huge mistake for Russia.
But now, watch me...
Turn it around. If Putin can hold out for 10 years, and then let's say he just dies of natural causes, if Russia then gets off of sanctions because Putin's gone, which is possible,
and then they start recovering their economy, in 20 years they're going to be remembering it as Putin expanded Russia at a cost, But they became a much greater country because, you know, the combined assets were amazing.
And so I think in 10 years, it's going to look like a disaster for Putin, and he might die looking like a disaster.
But in the 20-year span, I think Russia's going to look like they're glad they did it.
What do you think? The risk to the dollar system is significant?
I don't know. So, you know, as I say way too often, I have a degree in economics and MBA, but I couldn't tell you if we're teetering on the edge of financial Armageddon or not.
Because I think a lot of smart people would have said, we long past the point where our debt alone should have destroyed us.
I don't think anybody saw that it was possible.
We could have this much debt and the stock market, at least until this war happened, the stock market was going up and employment was looking good.
I mean, there's something about the economy that is so fundamentally mysterious, even to people who understand things about the economy, that I don't know what's going on.
I really don't know if anybody does.
All right.
All right, so that is all I have because there's not much going on.
At least not in the world.
I don't know about your personal lives.
Let me ask that. How are your personal lives?
Did the pandemic...
Tell me, better or worse?
Did the pandemic make your personal life better or worse?
A lot of people are saying better.
But it looks like a lot of worses.
Better or worse?
Way worse. Worse, worse, worse.
Same, worse. Yow.
Gosh.
Oh, my goodness.
Wow.
Worse.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I would say...
One of my trolls is funny.
Yeah. I would say it wasn't my favorite pandemic.
Alright, Chechen.
That's a troll named Chechen something.
We're going to remove you.
You are gone.
Alright, that's all I've got for now.
Let's hope that the news is better and more interesting tomorrow.
Especially better.
And I'll talk to you, YouTube, tomorrow.
What is up with this?
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